Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today, we want to talk about two subjects. The first one is on the theme of the West against the Rest and why the Rest might find it altogether much more difficult than some commentators have suggested to form a joint anti-Western position or a joint

position that's more independent of the West. And our second story is about the backlash

against green legislation. Starting in Germany in a very forceful way, it's now also becoming

a theme in Brussels. Susanna, you wrote about the Bricks, the forthcoming Bricks Summit and the difficult

strategic choices the leaders of the Bricksville are facing, and they're also their

internal divisions.

Yeah, the foreign ministers of these countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa came together in Johannesburg to prepare

the summit that is going to happen at some point in August. It started from this very

loose association and it turned into a much more ambitious project from the Chinese point of

view for fostering trade amongst these

emerging economies. Now with Russia's war in Ukraine, the whole thing turned into a much more

politically ambitious project. And the common denominator is to say, what can we do to counter

this Western predominance in the world? They all have different flavors to it.

And of course, Russia comes from the most squeezed position in a sense that they have been sanctioned from the West.

They've been shunned by, in all sort of institutions, while other member states of this brick block still have stakes and they still have relationships

with the West to cater for and one of the examples where it showed up is for example they

founded a development bank, a common development bank and this bank had to actually stop its

activities in Russia because they were subject to sanctions and they didn't want to compromise the operations in other member states.

So we see here there are various degrees of various shades of the desirability of actually what it means to confront the West.

And I think this is as much as it sounds like the one-liner, it's a much more

granulated picture closer by. The other thing is like we have Vladimir Putin. It is not

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